


the shrine on the top of the hill

by ImberNox



Series: Messiah -- It AU [1]
Category: Messiah Project - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, IT AU, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:47:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24818617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImberNox/pseuds/ImberNox
Summary: originally intended to be the fifth chapter of my it au1980's Japan : In a rural suburb of the Chuubu region, eight middle-schoolers navigate the threats that secrets can pose : secrets of affection, secrets of hatred, secrets of fear. Miike Mayo knows the consequences of letting light fall on these secrets, and he can't understand how Yugi can be so oblivious to the costs of his actions. Miike can only think of one thing that would get Honami and Oikawa away from them, and he does it. It turns out there are costly repercussions to doing the safest thing, too : beyond what any of them are able to take on.
Relationships: Miike Mayo/Yugi Kotarou
Series: Messiah -- It AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1795195





	the shrine on the top of the hill

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally supposed to be my fifth chapter in the it au. the fic builds in what was supposed to be a kind of heart-wrenching way (tho we'll see if i ever write it) where ch. 1 introduces the conflict (tho it's not clear yet to the reader /why/ its the conflict introduction and what the conflict is) while ch. 2 immediately swaps to mamiya/yuuri/shirasaki. ch. 3 introduces miike/yuuri/oikawa/honami as miike and yugi are in the middle of a horrible fight that concerns a past "fight" with honami and oikawa. it's left pretty unclear exactly what happened to make miike 'throw away' yugi, but it's abundantly clear that neither of them are happy and it's destroying them worse than what oikawa and honami can do. ch. 4 goes back to mamiya to give the reader a pause.
> 
> and, then, ch. 5 hits. this is supposed to be the chapter where the reader kinda goes "wait. wait. Ooohhh-" abt what miike's worried about, and the penny starts dropping on what exactly happened in ch. 1 (tho all the foreshadowing in this chapter is still only apparent upon rereads of the whole book ww). i had a lot of grandiose ideas for this fic, and i still wanna finish. but until i actually resume work on ch. 3, i figured i'd post this to at least get some finished work out there.

The falling out of Miike Mayo and Yugi Kotarou deserved its own memoir in local history papers. Their argument hadn’t necessarily affected anyone outside themselves and their families, but it meant something of great weight to the rest of the community still. It wouldn’t be the story of any front page. It likely wouldn’t receive even a bolded headline. But written somewhere in the small font of the fourth or fifth page of a wind-battered, sun-yellowed newspaper, there belonged a single paragraph on the decision that Mayo had made.

The reality of the matter was that no one actually knew what had transpired between Mayo and Kotarou, including Kotarou himself. The most that anyone understood was that whatever happened was a secret that Mayo trusted only himself with.

Miike Yamato heard well the disapproving tone in which Miike had uttered upon coming home that day : “That fool is incapable of listening.” It had been so cruelly spoken over stiff shoulders, and Mayo’s hands had been shaking though his head was turned away. There was no asking further, Yamato had known. Once his grandson fell into a mood, there was no fishing him back out of the pond.

And Mayo never left the waters. When Kotarou arrived on their front porch every morning for the next weeks until the end of the school year, waiting and wanting to walk with Mayo to their elementary school, Yamato had been tiptoeing over shattered glass in telling the boy that Mayo would never leave the house so long as he knew that Kotarou was waiting to speak with him. When the school year ended and the spring break had begun, Yamato had not seen Kotarou the entire time.

The secret that Mayo was keeping was not so much of a complete mystery to Kotarou as he thought, though. He remembered – in unbearable vividness – the moment in which his argument with Mayo was cut off.

The melting snow of early March had been lying clumped along riverbanks and around the thickets of trees and bushes. The open stretches of fields had been bare of the grey slush, though the ground was soaked with the fresh memory of its presence. In Kotarou’s foggy vision, the melting snow had been thick and drooping, and his mind had been sluggish. When his vision went dark and he could no longer see around him, Kotarou had thought that he could still see Mayo. He, at the very least, had thought for sure that he could see the view outside the windows of Mayo’s bedroom.

But Kotarou had been nowhere near the Miike household. Instead, he had been lying with his skull nearly split open on the unforgiving and March-chilled concrete of the elementary school’s curb. Later, his mother would explain to him that he had fallen unconscious the moment his head had hit and that he shouldn’t strain to remember the moment he fell or anything that came immediately afterwards. Kotarou wouldn’t be sure whether or not to believe all of what she told him, but he would dutifully listen to her advice. He would content himself to think that his memory of Mayo’s bedroom window and the sound of Mayo shouting his name – panic-stricken under grey skies as the clouds grew more distant from Kotarou’s falling form – was just a dream conjured by his concussion. But he would also privately remain convinced that he had felt the familiar touch of Mayo’s hands as they had dragged him by the armpits off of the curb : the warmth of Mayo’s form by his side until his parents arrived and everything truly went dark.

A voice inside him, bitter and hurt, had told him that it was all a delusion – a projected hope – that stemmed from the years that Kotarou had known and formed a deep affection for the other. When Mayo failed to visit the following day or the next, it had felt almost as if Mayo had died for how starkly lonely Kotarou was.

Kotarou did not see Mayo for the entire week that his mother insisted he stay home and recover from his concussion. There had been no comfortable companionship offered in small after-school visits. Instead, Kotarou had sat alone in his quiet and March-grey bedroom : staring at the ceiling and becoming accustomed to the itch of the stitches at the back of his head.

And in the long stretches of introspection, Kotarou had found himself bargaining against nothing. If he had just been sick – if that was all it had ever been, he had reasoned with himself – Mayo would have been kneeling at the tea table in the room and helping Kotarou with his take-home assignments. Mayo was always remarkably patient in such moments. It usually took a few explanations for Kotarou to really understand a concept, and Mayo was almost as good as Kotarou’s mother and sister at repeating himself however many times Kotarou needed before he understood. Even if Mayo’s tone strayed closer to condescending than Miyu or Tomomi’s ever did. Yet Kotarou knew better than to be insulted by Mayo’s tone.

It was a characteristic of Mayo that Yamato had once described as part of Mayo’s ‘worldview.’ Mayo’s worldview was something that their teachers often described as ‘untapped potential’ : ‘if only he’d pay closer attention to his studies,’ ‘if he learned to control his emotions better,’ ‘if he would stop napping through his morning lessons.’ Each time that Yamato had heard those or similar words during parent-teacher conferences, there might as well have been a typhoon blowing through the school’s staff room. It had taken until the fourth grade for the elementary school faculty to bend to Yamato’s demands for academic accommodations.

Afterwards, Kotarou had asked Yamato about why Miike was suddenly allowed to turn in so many assignments past their due dates. Yamato had told him that Mayo had been born with a mind that thought differently than most others. It was the reason why Mayo could never fall asleep easily during sleepovers and why he never stopped yawning until noon on most school days. It was why Mayo could skip his assignments for weeks and then manage to complete them all over a single Saturday as ‘catch up.’ It was the reason why he cried and got angry so, so easily and why he stayed that way for hours afterwards.

Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Mayo performed extraordinarily well in his school subjects once his accommodations were given. Kotarou’s good marks were a product of daily study with his mother, but Mayo’s grades seemed to require no effort. Yamato had warned that Mayo would run out of this academic vigor in his later education and had advised Mayo to learn time management skills for studying before he burnt out. That had been the beginning of Mayo’s afternoons tutoring Kotarou.

But then, having the tea table empty, Kotarou hadn’t known how to pass the time. He was banned from television and too much radio on account of his concussion, and he kept out of the living room as to not impede his mother’s television habits. His sister had insisted that long drives would only give him crippling headaches. Kotarou had voiced a desire to go outside, but, apparently, the doctor’s note had said limited exercise and lots of house rest.

His sister had made small efforts to make it more bearable for him, but all Kotarou had found himself really wanting was to be left alone with his thoughts. He had helped his sister cook meals, and he had appreciated her stepping out of the house frequently to get him more pudding. But his thoughts could not stop themselves from returning, achingly loyally, to Mayo.

Pudding flavors were either flavors that Mayo liked or flavors that Mayo hated. The view outside his bedroom window – muddy and grey – reminded him of a comment that Mayo had made, once, in passing, when he probably had thought that Kotarou was too busy tying his scarf to really be listening.

“I hate how slowly the seasons change.”

On a darker afternoon, when Kotarou had been feeling particularly bitter and lonely after being alone in the house all day, he had remembered back to those words and had thought that Mayo had no place remarking on the reluctance of the seasons to change. It wasn’t as if Mayo was particularly good at allowing himself to change.

For the entirety of the week, Mayo did not arrive once at the Yugi household. If Mayo had ever just shown up, Kotarou wouldn’t have even asked for an apology because he would have had Mayo there, and, for Kotarou, that would have been enough.

It had always been enough, anyway. In the four years that Kotarou and Mayo had known each other, spoken apologies weren’t something that they used with each other. Even when they had first met, they had chosen each other as friends through something unspoken.

Their elementary school had a strict rule of seating students by alphabetical order. So, when Mayo and Kotarou had met in the second year, Mayo had been assigned his seat with the rest of the ‘m’ names. By the time that the ‘y’ names were called – by the time Kotarou was called – the seat that he was assigned was the open seat beside Mayo’s.

Their interactions in the beginning had been brief encounters over homework collection and homeroom chores. Then, quite early into the third month of the school year, Kotarou had been the one to speak to Mayo. Their class had been reading a chapter book on the life of an adopted dog. Early in the first chapter – in the description of the puppy’s heartbreak at leaving its mother and siblings – Mayo had stood up in class and had announced fearlessly to their teacher, “We shouldn’t have to read this book.”

A lengthy exchange between teacher and student had followed.

“It’s important to learn to deal with unhappy feelings before we have to feel them ourselves. This story helps us to understand what that situation might feel like. This way, we can be kinder to those who may have had something similar happen.”

“But we shouldn’t have to read things that are horrible just to feel good about ourselves.”

That afternoon on the walk home to school – which Kotarou shared with Mayo since their houses were in the same direction across the river – Kotarou had drawn close to where Mayo lingered in the back of the line.

“Um, I, uh, I thought what you said earlier was nice.”

“Huh?”

“Or, um, I thought it was… brave? Um. I think- I thought- I agreed with what you said. I thought you were right. About the book.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you looked pretty when talking about it.”

A giggle of “ew!” from a girl in front of them had Kotarou avert his gaze and stare down at his feet as he had walked. Mayo hadn’t responded with anything further. But the following day, during lunch period, a Mayo’s hand had latched onto Kotarou’s wrist and had stolen him off to a forgotten corner of the school’s hallways to share bentou.

From there, it had been whispering. Kotarou had been awestruck by the confidence with which Mayo carried himself and his talent on quizzes and assignments, asking question after question to Mayo whenever the teacher’s back was turned. Exchanging notes and sharing lunches came easily to them. It had been just as easy when they began walking each other all the way to their home gates : switching who walked who depending on the day.

When a particularly strong monsoon had cancelled school early, they had shared a single umbrella all the way from school’s step to Mayo’s door.

So, when he yelled at Subaru for harassing Mayo frequently or threw Harei’s bentou box into the trash after Harei insulted Mayo, Kotarou couldn’t perceive it as anything other than what came easily.

It was why, when he saw Subaru shove Mayo onto the school sidewalk and Harei rip the backpack from Mayo’s shoulders that Kotarou had no thought of doing anything but moving forwards and slamming his palms into Subaru’s back. What he hadn’t expected was the swing that Subaru had retaliated with, sending Kotarou down away from the early March sky and down to the cold curbside.

Waking up and learning over the course of a lonely, empty week that Mayo wasn’t coming for him was the heaviest Kotarou’s chest had ever felt.

To Mayo, though, it was the only thing he could do to ensure that the events of that afternoon never happened again.

Mayo knew – knew so well it hollowed out his chest and stomach like water weathers canyons – that, as long as his thought lingered on Kotarou, Harei would hate Kotarou just as much as he did Mayo. And where Harei’s ire lay, his and Subaru’s fists followed. Mayo’s four years of friendship with Kotarou had been a risk growing water-logged with every second that passed. Tripping over such a weight had been inevitable, and Mayo had known so somewhere in the back of his mind. Yet it wasn’t until that March day that it had become clear to him that all of those four years had been a mistake.

Kotarou’s fall had been a horror to witness. He had only noticed Kotarou approaching Subaru from behind after it all happened. But he had seen the swing coming from the look of hot anger on Subaru’s face at the moment he was shoved off of him. When the punch landed and Kotarou’s foot slipped on a too-slick part of the macadam, Mayo’s breath had caught in his throat. He had watched Kotarou land skull-first onto the concrete curb, and he had seen Kotarou’s eyes go blank before they closed and his frame fell limp to the cold ground.

Subaru had moved towards Kotarou – still infuriated and ready to continue landing hits – but Harei’s hand had grabbed onto the fur of his winter coat. Harei had known the consequences of getting caught hurting someone, and he had dragged himself and Subaru away and into the thickening flurries, leaving Mayo laying frozen in horror some feet from Kotarou’s body.

It had been with shaking hands that Mayo had crawled, hissing in pain from the bruises that were sure to blossom black and purple on his body by next morning, to Kotarou’s form. And, checking for breath, shakily exhaled in relief when he found Kotarou’s soft breathing warm and steady.

The school nurse had been the one to call Kotarou’s parents. When Mayo had dizzily asked her how she had known to run outside, she had said that she came as soon as she heard the scream. Mayo hadn’t and didn’t remember anyone screaming during the entire altercation, but he was too shell-shocked in watching Yugi Takuma carry his son’s motionless body into the car for his wife to rush them to the hospital to put much thought into what she had said. After evading the nurse’s questions about what had happened, Mayo had walked home alone. In that walk home, he had had thirty minutes of quiet reflection amongst the biting snowflakes, wherein which Mayo did nothing but wallow in self-hatred. He knew that above all else it had been his fault that Kotarou had gotten involved and his fault further for inciting Harei into hurting either of them at all.

It had been entirely his fault for caring so much for Kotarou. After all, he had known the possessive streak that Harei had.

In his first year – before he had met Kotarou and the entire mess of events – Harei had been in Mayo’s class and had demonstrated an unhealthy obsession with Mayo. Every day, Harei would sit with Mayo as partners at their small desks, and, every day, he would make scathing remarks about the appearance or personality of students who accidentally took his spot beside Mayo. Even quicker than the speed at which their teacher had identified Harei as a troublemaker, Mayo had categorized Harei in his mind as someone he needed to avoid if he wanted to make it out of that school unharmed.

The unfortunate aspect was that Harei had been entirely convinced that Mayo thought of him as his best friend. And, so, Mayo was forced to put up with sharing lunches and cubicles : spending class and recess time with Harei married to his every movement.

When Mayo had realized that they weren’t to be sharing a homeroom the following year, he had foolishly rejoiced that it was over. He had walked down the hallway away from the homeroom announcement board and had been about to turn into his classroom when the commotion had begun.

The screams that Harei had produced in outrage upon reading the homeroom announcement board shook Mayo with intense fear even after hiding behind the classroom door.

Mayo can’t remember anymore the day he and Kotarou became friends. Whatever had transpired on that long-lost day, Mayo knew it had been the biggest mistake of his life. In the shortest of terms, Kotarou’s presence had succeeded in keeping ample distance between Harei and himself. Mayo remembers, at least, the unvoiced fury in Harei’s eyes whenever the other had caught sight of Mayo and Kotarou together. Mayo curses himself for how stupid he had been to disregard the intensity of Harei’s emotions.

It had been because, if he were to be honest with himself, Mayo had been wholly distracted by Kotarou’s presence. In comparison to the amusement of Kotarou’s dumb questions about clouds and fairies, Harei hadn’t mattered to him at all. And Kotarou’s willingness to retaliate against Harei for whatever Harei tried to do to Mayo had meant, at the time, that Harei couldn’t do much at all against Mayo’s apathy towards him.

The first warning sign had been the day of the monsoon. It had been miserable just for the fact that it was a monsoon, and Mayo hated the rain even back then. School had been canceled early due to predicted rainfall, and Kotarou and Mayo had arrived at the umbrella rack by their lockers only to find Mayo’s clear umbrella on the floor : broken to bits.

Mayo had fumed the entire walk home as Kotarou had struggled to match the swiftness of his strides – accidentally splashing Mayo’s feet with his bright yellow rainboots and failing extraordinarily to keep his neon umbrella over both of their heads. The next week at school, Kotarou had stolen Harei’s rainboots from his locker and had tossed them in the bathroom trash can. The back-and-forth had begun, then, but it had still been a relative stalemate.

All of that had changed when Subaru had moved into the valley. Subaru’s entrance into the equation had single-handedly overthrown equilibrium and had made fourth year the worst imaginable. Suddenly, the dismissal that Mayo had shrugged Harei off with had become weighted with sober gravity and consequence. With Subaru, Harei could take on both Mayo and Kotarou at once. And he had. No longer were the only offenses stolen boots and ripped umbrellas.

Fourth year was also when the bruises began. Whatever lies Harei had fed to Subaru about Mayo and Kotarou, Subaru had believed them like Eve had believed the Snake’s temptations. And so, there had been kicking during gym class. There had been harassment over the most mundane of tasks : shoving Mayo out of ground-floor windows while clapping chalkboard erasers ; tripping while carrying the classroom trash bin. Trash days had been especially bad. In late summer, Mayo once had to go home early after ‘accidentally dumping the trash onto himself.’

Kotarou, in contrast, had made it through fourth year relatively unscathed. But he had asked about Mayo’s bruises, and so Mayo had begun lying. The incidents had become too numerous that Mayo had no choice but to lie about where the bruise on his knee or the cut on his forehead had come from. He had seen that Kotarou didn’t believe his lies. The looks of disappointment and pure worry only silenced Mayo further in his shame.

Yamato had interrogated him one afternoon on the largescale introduction of long-sleeves to Mayo’s warm weather wardrobe and, yelling through tears at his grandson, had thrusted the fabric of Mayo’s shirt up to the elbows to reveal his wrists. At their smooth bareness, Yamato had collapsed suddenly into the wooden rocking chair – the cherry wooden rocking chair that his daughter, that Mayo’s mother, had made four years before her death – and stared listlessly at the family photographs on their mantle. He had apologized later, voice scratchy, for doubting Mayo.

Mayo had only had a faint grasp on what Yamato had been accusing of him, but he had a more solid grasp on exactly what his mother’s death had done to him. He would have cared more, too ; he had wanted to care more. But in light of Subaru’s new presence and Harei’s new power, his parents’ death had been numb.

And, so, Mayo kept silent from his grandfather, too.

His silence, regrettably, had not erased the ever-flowing concern from Kotarou or Yamato. When Subaru had been bold enough to throw a pair of scissors at Mayo one day, Kotarou had wrung Subaru’s wrist red. Yamato, upon seeing nicks upon nicks too many to be careless, had gone to Mayo’s homeroom teacher with inquiries of bullying.

By the time Kotarou fell to the curb two years later in early March, there was no way to take any of it back.

Mayo had walked home with his backpack in tatters that day. It had taken Yamato some time to waken from his nap even once Mayo had made it home and inside. Before Yamato woke, Mayo had dried and combed his hair : bandaged his elbows. But it hadn’t hid the black bruise on his cheek, nor his backpack at the doorway with its straps dangling by their threads. He had sat at the dinner table – mind replaying the way Kotarou’s body had fallen limp – until Yamato had woken. Under Yamato’s tired and mournful gaze, Mayo had begun sobbing.

Yamato had put the kettle on the stove to boil and had gathered his grandson into his arms. They sat on the living room floor, nestled amongst the pillows, for hours. Mayo never told Yamato what happened : never told anyone what had happened. As far as he had cared, he was never going to let Kotarou back into Harei’s sphere of attention again.

So, he didn’t go to Kotarou’s house when Kotarou took the week off to recover from his concussion. When Kotarou returned for the last two weeks of the school year, Mayo acted as though the space Kotarou occupied was empty air. He could see Kotarou struggling for his attention in the pencils that Kotarou dropped, but Mayo kept his eyes cast down.

Spring break was the quietest spring had ever been. Without Kotarou going to _hanami_ with him and the hum of the ever-busy Yugi household, Mayo became aware for the first time how quiet his own house was with his parents gone. Yamato was striving to bring happiness into the still corners of rooms. He cooked large meals and decorated for the season, but the house felt like a coffin to the memories of Mayo’s parents.

A few times, Mayo felt tightness in his chest enough to tiptoe down the hallway with a question about his parents on his tongue. Each time, he had fallen short at the threshold to the living room. The sight of Yamato asleep amongst the pillows with bags sunken deep below his eyes had been somehow more painful than the unspoken memories that Mayo carried, and so he would sneak back to his bedroom and stare out the windows until his hands inevitably reached for his sketchbook.

He was relieved when the school year restarted. Middle school was a new experience even if most of the class was composed of the same students. Seeing Kotarou’s name under his homeroom didn’t bother Mayo as much as he had expected. He reasoned with himself that it was because he had already had an entire month away from Kotarou. And, while Kotarou had always been strangely desperate to forgive Mayo for their disputes and move on with their friendship, a month of abandonment should have soured Kotarou to any notion of interaction with Mayo. Mayo could keep him safely away if that animosity continued to simmer.

When Kotarou had instead approached to confront him in what had escalated into a one-sided shouting match, Mayo hadn’t known what to do. He bluffed his way through, and, once it was over, he had run for the hills. And Kotarou had followed. It was like they were back in the third grade : when Mayo had run from an argument and Kotarou had followed on his heels until Mayo climbed a tree too thin for Kotarou to reach him. And, even then, Kotarou had sat down on the gnarled roots until Mayo had to climb back down for dinner.

It would be flattering if, this time, it isn’t going to get Kotarou killed. He can’t comprehend how ignorant Kotarou seems of his dire circumstances : chasing after Mayo so publicly, arguing with Mayo so loudly. It antagonizes him. There are only so many times that warnings could be given.

Two weeks past in gym class, Subaru had tripped Mayo as he went to take a shot at the basketball hoop and had sent him crashing onto the floor. A thin trickle of blood leading from his nose to his upper lip, Mayo was called out to sit on the sidelines. Immediately, Kotarou had volunteered in. Subaru was shoved roughly to the floor as soon as the whistle blew. As Kotarou was chewed out by their gym instructor, Mayo had buried his face in his hands and knees. There was no way he could keep Kotarou out of the shambles of Harei and Mayo’s past.

Most people, Mayo knows, understand the grit of roadside gravel and sidewalk scrapes in fleeting accidents. These accidents, too, are sparse throughout a lifetime for most. It is a sensation that follows the odd trip, usually taken most often in young childhood when one’s legs are too unsteady to carry such a quickly-moving body. Eventually, those steps become surer until running blocks becomes a second-nature habit for middle and high schoolers eager to get home in the fewest minutes possible.

Mayo, however, has the surest feet in his grade – and probably four grades above him as well – and yet has been shoved into the gravel more times than he can count. He’s been running from since the second grade playground, and there seems to be no end in sight. His sure-footedness does not stem from relentless practice, though it surely contributes to it. Instead, there’s a much more pressing matter at hand. It comes in the form of two boys the same age – both of whom Mayo and Kotarou alike would swear up and down were the embodiment of every wrathful deity ever spoken of in literature and legend.

If there was a single step that did not come down onto the pavement correctly, therein would follow the fists and sneakers of these two boys. It’s not constant that Mayo is chased, but he has the luck that, whenever he trips, they’re lurking around the next corner. Kotarou had once chalked it up to a deeply unfortunate series of coincidences in a conversation that had rewarded him with the silent treatment for nearly two weeks of the fifth grade.

Mayo had known – still knows – that coincidence is not the same as luck, nor willful intent. He’s seen too many bloody knees and elbows to still believe in the innocence of ‘coincidence’ as a term to describe his encounters with Harei and Subaru.

Even now with his feet pounding the dust of the roadside, Mayo thinks wildly about which action of today had been a mistake. Is it his choice to leave the band corridor immediately after practice rather than lingering a little longer? Is it that Kotarou and he had been too loud in their bickering : attracting too many unwanted ears? Is it that Mayo had walked past Class 1-C at just the wrong second between the wrong periods, falling into the field of vision of just the wrong person who had just the wrong inclinations for after-school activities? He slams each foot onto the road’s pavement with enough force to push him a little beyond his usual gait.

He’s wearing the sneakers that Tomomi had given him for last winter’s end-of-year gift exchange. They’re Mayo’s favorite pair, though he would never aloud admit that he prefers a gift from the Yugi family over the old, battered pair that Yamato bought him four years prior. The flaw with Tomomi’s sneakers, however, is that the laces come undone too easily.

So, it’s with loose laces lashing against his reddened shins and calves, spitting threats and making each step a heart-wrenching possibility of _what-if_ that Mayo runs. He runs past the rusted mailboxes that stand at the mouth of Kogure Jun’s property. He runs past the stream that has its birthplace at the dam and flows behind the bleachers of the elementary school’s track field. He runs past bird nests and mouse dens. He runs past tall and short grasses. Not once do the laces trip him.

He loses Harei and Subaru around the bend of picketed fences. He pants, feet still and chest heaving. His laces flow from his shoes.

Ahead another five minutes is his house with a sure promise of safety. To his right, even more tempting, are the stone steps that lead to the roadside shrine : a leftover from the 1930s according to the dinnertime ramblings of Miike Yamato.

He can’t hear Subaru or Harei behind him anymore. He makes his decision in a thoughtless second. His feet pound up the incline – taking stone step by stone step – until the trees open up into a small clearing.

The shrine itself is a stone monument of little ornamentation. Its hearth lies bereft of offerings. The shade of the trees seems to kiss Mayo, but he ducks away from the shadows. He makes his dash for the backside of the stone pillar and tucks himself into the earth and shadow there. He clamps his mouth shut and strains to listen.

There is nothing but the sound of his heart racing in his ears and the heaving of his whole body alongside the intense dizziness that comes whenever he runs too long and too fast. It’s an indeterminable time that he waits, though he’s sure it’s not nearly as short as it feels.

Then, he notices the compost pile.

Suddenly, he forgets all about the heaviness of his breaths. All that’s left is his arrested self and the heap of leaves, mulch, and waste vegetables.

He leans out towards it. From the fetal position, he unfurls to crawl on his knees. They sink into the soft dirt : loose and moist from shade. His fingers sink into the earth, too. He moves forwards. With his next movement, his hand sinks into something wetter than the soil.

Mayo gags and, looking down, slowly withdraws his hand from the soil. The stickiness of the clear, non-viscous fluid forces him to scrunch his face in repulsion. He wipes it onto a nearby mound of soil, but the dark dirt remains clumped to his fingers and palm. He grimaces. He sets his hand back down in front of him : avoiding the puddle of shattered eggs. His eyes settle on the dirt, and he shuffles forwards another meter.

He’s wondering what this is doing beside a shrine when he smells it.

It’s an odor rancid unlike anything else of description. In summer, the woods sometimes have this stench. Barns and chicken coops after a bout of disease amongst the animals have this stench. Roadkill has this stench. The dead birds, littering his dreams, have this stench. Mayo feels his throat close up for a very different reason that just the foulness of the odor in the air. He recognizes that he’s scared and doesn’t know how to reconcile it. Instead, he moves forwards, though it occurs to him that he doesn’t know why he still moves forwards.

Shakily, he draws in a breath. The stench crawls into his lungs and festers there when he refuses to take a second. His hands move forwards again. His knees follow. A moment later, and he’s advanced three paces.

He kneels at the edge of the compost pile with his legs sinking into a repulsive muck of smashed egg shells, their whites and their yolks, and some other unidentifiable liquid. He sits back on his heels and reaches out for the compost pile.

With one swipe, he sees a hint of grey bone and torn, blackened skin. The stench pours out from the hole in the compost pile, and Mayo barely withholds the urge to retch in favor of reaching out with his other hand and taking the second swipe.

He finds himself shrieking in terror, legs churning against loose soil and mud in blurred hysteria, thrashing desperately to put space between him and the thing buried in the compost pile. One of his hands comes down hard, and the sound of bones snapping somehow cuts through the pitch of his scream. He looks down and recognizes with growing panic the bird’s chest that his hand is now in : blood back and thick and oozing over his hand. He shrieks again and flings his hand back to his chest. He stumbles over himself back to the shrine’s stone pillar.

Hands snatch his shoulder with a vice grip. He screeches as he’s dragged backwards towards the tree line. He flails and squirms, kicking out with his legs. One catches the sharp edge of a rock. And though he feels it slice through his skin – though he feels the warmth of his own blood leaking down his leg – he continues trying to wrench away from the hands one at a time as they catch him again and again.

Some force punches into the side of his ribcage, and his screeches are silenced into whistling breaths of winded pain. The hands drop him. His head falls back into the soil with a squelch. A cold liquid seeps into his hair.

He makes to get up : hoping that, if he could just make it to his hands and knees, he can drag himself out of this as he has dragged himself out of so many other things. He’s flipped onto his stomach before his elbows can even prop himself up.

He feels whatever liquid that had seeped into his hair now against his eyelids, which are scrunched shut, and his clenched hips. He dares not breathe, and his lungs burn all the fiercer for it.

The hand on the back of his head lifts its pressure briefly, and he flings his neck back, gulping in air that he had only just hacked out.

“Stay down,” Subaru’s voice threatens somewhere to his right. He’s close and a little above him, but it seems a mile away from where Mayo lays.

Mayo coughs more, trying to regain his breath. He’s flipped back onto his stomach, and he grunts against the jostling. He spits out some half-formed word of anger. The dizziness makes it hard to tell where exactly he’s facing, but he knows he spat it in Subaru’s direction.

There’s the sudden blinding pain of a heavy stone bashed against his forearm, and he shouts out with the pain of it. He kicks out blindly with the leg on that side. He feels his foot hit its mark and recognizes that cry as Subaru’s. He spits out a laugh, trying to sit up. Harei’s hand finds his chest and shoves him back down.

Mayo can’t guess at what Harei is going to do to him or what Subaru will do to him. His vision clears just enough to meet Harei’s gaze. He finds it in himself to tongue a wad of saliva in his mouth and, with all of his remaining clear thought, he spits it onto Harei’s cheek. His head falls back into the soil before he can see the glob hit its mark, but the disgusted gasp tells him that he was successful in his aim.

He’s fully prepared to have his nose busted in by Subaru’s fist. It’s happened enough times that he lies to himself that it won’t hurt as bad this time. But it’s then that he hears an achingly familiar voice raised in outrage : wild and unrestrained.

“Get off of him!”

There’s a high-pitched squalor that’s similar to the cry of a spanked child, and Mayo knows that Subaru has made a fatal error in trying to slug Kotarou. A shout comes from Harei – something about Subaru’s wrist – before a resounding groan of pain.

“Leave him alone.” Kotarou growls the words.

Mayo shuts his eyes. There’s no point in having them open anymore. A sigh tumbles from his lips. It’s gusty and defeated.

Two pairs of footsteps stumble away huffing and grunting from their injuries. A single pair of footsteps strides closer to where Mayo lays. Knees dig into the soil by Mayo’s head.

“I hate you.”

Mayo’s head is lifted by gentle but furious hands and rested down on strong thighs. Breathing comes easier in this new position. Mayo has to swallow a throatful of bile, but he opens his eyes and sees Kotarou staring down at him. His eyebrows are knitted in concern, though his eyes hold fortemente fury.

“How did you know where I was?” Mayo asks.

“You were screaming at the top of your lungs.” Mayo has never heard Kotarou this enraged before. “What were you doing here? Your house is just around the bend.” The accusation is laced in the tone Kotarou uses. Mayo could have made it if only he had kept running.

“I don’t know,” Mayo admits. He shuts his eyes again.

The memory of the compost pile hits him in the chest at full force. He bolts upright and scrambles away from the compost pile and out of Kotarou’s lap. The speed of his movements, though, is too quick for his tired limbs to keep up, and he collapses into the soil : whiplash sending his vision spiraling.

Kotarou’s hands latch onto him : pulling him up and back into his lap.

“The body!” Miike rushes. He flings a hand towards the compost pile but whacks Kotarou’s chin in the process. Kotarou cradles his jaw, and Miike snatches the opportunity to scramble further away. “There’s a body in the pile! Look! There! Check it! In the pile there’s a body! Look!”

He cuts off his pleas when Kotarou begins to move towards the compost pile. Each footstep of Kotarou’s squelches in the beats of Mayo’s heart. Kotarou reaches the compost pile and kneels. His hands dig into the pile. They push away whole smears of dirt. There’s a moment still enough for Mayo to vomit in an indent of the soil to his side. When he raises his head, Kotarou has already stood back up.

“The body-” Miike hiccups.

Kotarou picks him up from the ground. Just for a second, Mayo lets his eyes trace the struggle of Yugi’s arms and back to support his weight.

“There’s no body.” Kotarou’s still angry. Mayo can’t understand how he’s supposed to respond. “I’m taking you to Yamato,” Kotarou tells him, already walking to the steps that will lead them back down to the road.

“Put me down,” Mayo snaps. As he sees it, he has much more reason to be the one pissed. “Put me down, and leave me alone.”

“I’m not listening to this anymore!” Kotarou roars and drops Mayo.

He ignores the outcry of pain and ache that erupts from Mayo upon impact.

“You ignored me for _months_! I took a beating for you, and you _left_ me! You never even visited! You never came around to ask after me, never came to drop anything off. How many times, Miike? How many times did I go to your house and bring you whatever you wanted after you got beat up by them? It happened to me _once_ , and you _bailed._

“I’m sick of the way you can’t help but look down on me. I’m not _secondary_ , Miike. It’s not all about you, Honami, and Oikawa. That’s not what any of this is about. It’s always been about _you_ and _me_.”

“Don’t lecture me on things you don’t have a clue about!” Mayo yells back. “You don’t understand any of this! This isn’t about _you_ at all, and it’s not about _us_. You’re not a part of this. Stop bringing yourself into the middle of everything.”

For a moment, Mayo thinks Kotarou is going to sock him. The fist hanging by Kotarou’s side is a threat, but, after a heart-wrenching minute, it falls away.

“I’m taking you home,” Kotarou repeats. The disappointment is palpable.

“Kotarou,” Mayo mumbles. The words don’t taste good on his tongue. They never have. “Just leave.”

Kotarou clenches his jaw, bends down, and picks Mayo up once again. And for all that Mayo wants to fight his way out of Yugi’s hold, he’s too weak to put up any meaningful resistance. He lets himself be carried down the stone steps and back home.

Miike Yamato is tending to the roses in the front garden when he sees Yugi Kotarou carrying his grandson through the property fence and towards the house. He drops his gardening tools and rushes over, accepting Mayo’s arm over his shoulder to help him into the house. At the threshold, he turns to invite Kotarou in for tea – an explanation – when his grandson interrupts him.

“Don’t.” It’s the coldest he’s ever spoken with Yamato. “He’s not welcome.”

Yamato, for his part, has no response to his grandson’s words. He sends Kotarou a questioning look, but the young boy avoids his gaze. Yamato decides to let it be for now and focuses on helping his grandson as they enter their home.

Kotarou, left outside in the grass, feels his throat and chest clench up with an emotion that has him feel like he’s choking.

“I hate you,” he whispers angrily at the open doorway and leaves.


End file.
